Better than a Swiss army knife: A Swiss email account, and it is free

Note: If you believe anybody except you and the receiver should be able to read the contents of email or other electronic communications at will, please skip the body of this post. Either read the very last paragraph or go straight to say www.pointless.com.

Email providers with some degree of privacy have been around for much longer than average users know.

One of the first was Canadian based Hushmail. Which you do not want to use for anything except sending birthday greetings to your grandmother if we believe this WIRED article.
Since this happened ages ago, you may have never heard of it.

Another one that you may have heard of is Lavabit, also known as Edward Snowden's email provider. Founded in 2004, Lavabit functioned quietly for many years but having been Snowden's email provider turned out to be really bad.

The resident bytepusher at the K-Landnews long relished in comparing the steps needed to encrypt documents and email to the early years of cars:
This encryption business is like having to start cars with a hand crank in the old days, and you needed to carry oil and tools or - even better - have some mechanics training to travel safely.

While some hard core security folks will tell people to not use email at all, others had a more realistic view and tackled email content privacy in a healthy way.

That's the team of Protonmail.ch. Your outgoing email is encrypted before it leaves your browser. Incoming mail is decrypted once it has reached your browser. They don't store connection information on their servers, and you don't need to provide a verified email address for signup.

Right now, an invite is needed to obtain a Protonmail account. You can ask for an invite on their web site, and you will have to provide an email address to receive their "your account is ready" notification.

We still think crypto parties are a good idea but maybe there can be a little bit more emphasis on party.

In case you did not notice, our contact email address has changed to protonmail.ch.

Came for the Note?
The supposed dangers of encryption are a red herring. Please read up on the relevance of metadata.